Lovely sentiments from Noah Smith[1] on a few of your favorite bloggers, including Josh Brown and yours truly:

Barry Ritholtz: There is a huge amount of financial disinformation and misinformation and just plain bullshit out there in the world. Most financial news is random noise, and some is even worse than that. And there’s a good reason why there is all that bad financial information out there: it makes money for the people who put it out there. Thus, it is kind of a wonder that Barry Ritholtz exists at all.

Barry Ritholtz works in the financial industry, giving people advice and helping them manage their money. But in addition, he offers lots of free advice on his blog, The Big Picture. That in and of itself is highly unusual. Much of his advice is about how you shouldn’t trust the finance industry of which he is a part. That is even more unusual. And when Barry makes a correct prediction – such as when he nearly perfectly called the bottom after the 2008 stock market crash – he attributes it to luck. That is pretty extraordinary. Along with his partner and fellow blog hero Josh Brown (The Reformed Broker[2]), Barry is helping to bring honesty to financial media.

Barry is, to my knowledge, the first popular finance blogger to report extensively on behavioral finance. Since most individual investors (read: YOU) tend to make a ton of investing mistakes – trading too much, chasing trends, being overconfident, etc. etc. – behavioral finance is probably the single most important thing that most blog readers can learn about. Well done.

Truly lovely and humbling sentiments. I will do my best to live up to the philosophy Noah describes . . .